Empire: World History - 270. The Day The Brits Burned The White House (Ep 4)

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

Why did Washington invade Quebec? How did the US fail to take the Canadian territories during the Revolutionary Wars? And why did the British burn the White House? Anita and William are once again joined by Maya Jasanoff to discuss how the American Revolution birthed Canada. ----------------- Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. ----------------- Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. To Empire with me, Anita Arnhem. And me, William Durimple. Now, in the last episode, we're looking at how the seven-year war ended both New France and pretty much any hope that the French Empire in the Americas would ever become a reality. But it did also bring its own problems.

And that is the American Revolution. And we are once again delighted to be joined by Maya Jassanoff, author of Liberty's Exile, the loss of America and the remaking of the British Empire, which is partly about this transformation. So, I mean, let's first of all look at this aftermath of the seven-year war. I mean, we touched on it before, but the main thing is, you have to pay for the bullets and shots that you fired. And to do that, you need to raise taxes.

But you know what? The colonists don't like taxes very much because they don't see why they have to pay for an exchequer far, far away when they're the ones fighting the hardships in the land of expedition and pushing back boundaries that those in London will never understand. Or even more to the point when they don't get to have a say

in the selection of their representatives. But for the purposes of thinking about Canadian history, we might want to highlight a couple of other consequences of the seven years war leading up to the American Revolution. So the big issue there really has to do with the way that the British are going to manage having acquired this vast expanse of territory of North America. And there are two big challenges that that presents to them. One of them is a security challenge, which is that they now have this huge frontier against not another empire. So in that sense, They're pretty safe, as it were, but in effect, between their own colonists and the indigenous peoples who obviously really own all of that land in the West.

And in order to try to put a cap on the possibility for military expenses defending that frontier, in order to try to prevent the colonists from triggering conflicts and wars and so on with the Indian. the British decide to ban any settlement by the colonists over a line, which is called the proclamation line, which essentially runs the spine of the Appalachians. Now, of course, you'll remember that back in the 1750s, for example, what is it the George Washington and the governor of Virginia are interested in doing? They're interested in grabbing that land. And now the British have won it, and they're saying, sorry, we're going to limit your settlement. So that's what we're One big thing. Maya, just to break in there, what's the motive of the British?

Presumably, it's not at this period indigenous rights. They want to just avoid conflict and lower costs? The primary thing is to avoid conflict and lower costs. I mean, I do think that there are real recognitions of Indian sovereignty, particularly, as I've mentioned, there's this treaty kind of alliance of some decades standing with the Haudan Ashani in upstate New York, for instance. I think that there's some recognition of native sovereignty. But yes, I mean, primarily they're not interested in having bloody encounters that they're going to have to step in and clean up.

Which is the same as we get in India, where it's often the guys on the ground who are aggressive while you have this stream of letters coming from London just saying, stay in your factory, count your spices and your cotton pieces and don't go on any military adventures. The second big thing that the British have to deal with is the fact that they now, as the rulers, French-speaking Quebec, as they rename this province and present at Canada, is they have to figure out how to incorporate these people as imperial subjects at a time when so much of British identity is anchored in Protestantism and anchored in animosity toward France and the French. So they ultimately pass an act called the Quebec Act of 1774, which makes various concessions to the French-speaking Catholics, among them, freedom of worship. Which is quite a radical thing at this point, where anti-Catholicism is very strong in Protestant Europe, and in Britain in particular.

This is a time when a Catholic cannot serve in the British Parliament because the oaths of loyalty that are required would force somebody to renounce their religion, which they're not going to do. And that doesn't change in Britain itself until the 1820s. And something like that is at stake in Quebec, where essentially in order to get people to be able to participate in civic life, they have to be able to swear various oaths. And one of the things kind of technically that the Quebec Act does is it changes the way the oaths are sworn so that these French-speaking Catholics no longer have to essentially renounce their religion in order to be able to swear allegiance to George III. But this is angering to the Anglo-Provistants for various reasons. They feel that their edge is being whittled away. They don't like other provisions of the Act, which include what they take to be authoritarian measures on the part of the British government. And the Act also actually formalizes a boundary of settlement. Again, there had been this proclamation line of 1763, running the

length of the Appalachians. It was a little bit fuzzy. The Quebec Act sort of formalizes a line, which runs from central New York State as it is today along the Ohio River Valley and kind of blocks off settlement west of that line by columnists. So I always thought when Trump talks about the imaginary line that's been drawn between our two countries, I thought he was always talking about the actual creation of Canada with the Confederation. But could he even be referring to this line that's been drawn by the British? I mean, you're throwing your hands up in the air, which sort of tells me, who knows what

Trump is thinking? But I mean, do some people regard this as an imaginary line in America at the time? Like, you know, why the hell are you drawing our lines? You're over there in Westminster. What do we care about your lines? This actually raises an interesting question of the cartographic imagination and what people saw spatially, visually, what they imagined. I think that it's not coincidental that this is a period in which map making and publishing

is increasing. And, in fact, people are getting a greater spatial. sense of what territory looks like. But it's still a bit nascent. It will be accessible to some people and not others. And one interesting thing, if you look at maps of this period, is you'll see colors being used in different sorts of ways to indicate certain things. There's one map, for example, of the colonies and the period, I think it's right before the Seven Years' War, where you see these basically bars of color that just go endlessly further west, because there's no sense that there's a kind of Western boundary to any of the claims on the Eastern Seaboard.

I really say they're just a wash that goes forever. That's amazing. Oh my God. Okay, I'd love to have look at that. Maia, in 1774, you get the trumpet blast of the summoning of the Continental Congress, but you don't get any delegates coming from what's now Canada, from the northern half of British North America. Why is that? Why is that line already beginning to form that will become, in a sense, the boundary between Canada and America. One thing to bear in mind is that there are not that many English-speaking people living there. So it's numerically really quite small. Even Nova Scotia that's got quite a lot of English-speaking people by this stage

isn't sending delegates to Philadelphia. Nova Scotia is the top choice for the Patriots, particularly in Massachusetts, which is really the engine of the revolution in many ways. to try to get in on the act of the opposition to Britain in the 1770s. Nova Scotia is, there are definitely people who are sympathetic to the Patriot ideas, which at this stage include greater representation, obviously, and include greater autonomy in various ways commercially and so on. That said, it is heavily commercially dependent on Britain.

This is a place whose economy really is revolving around the cod fisheries, the cod fisheries, as we've discussed, are tied up in this trade around sugar, around slavery. And they're, again, numerically small. They also have an important naval operation in Halifax, which is the capital of Nova Scotia, and is in possession of a port that basically doesn't ice over because it's in the Gulf Stream and so on it. So they have this military presence. It's just enough different from Massachusetts. It's smaller.

it's more economically and militarily dependent on Britain, that it doesn't have, when they weigh up the calculus, should we go with these things, should we not, they don't have the same interests. And is the same true further inland, places like Montreal? Because that, the economy isn't based on so much as the fur trade. The fur trade is already starting to decline. I mean, there's commerce in general. There's some fur trading. There's some, of course, still timber is still important. But the main thing there is it's a majority French community. These are majority French Catholic communities. And so, yes, I mean, there are definitely efforts by the Anglo-Protestants to bring these people in.

But bearing in mind that one of the things they're angry about is the Quebec Act. And let's put this all together. Okay. So the Quebec Act is 1774. The Continental Congress is 1774. This is not a coincidence. That is, the Continental Congress is called in response to what, be colonists will call the intolerable acts, Boston Tea Party and so on. But the Quebec Act

passed precisely partly to neuter any kind of possibility that the Quebecwa, the Abiton, the French-speaking residents of this region, will join with the English-speaking colonies. And yet, I mean, Washington really doesn't take that as a final solution because it's only a year later where he decides, okay, we're going to invade Quebec. I mean, whether they like it or not, we are going to liberate them. And this is a recap. theme in the history of America and Canada, where you will have periodically Americans who will go and try and you choose your word, if you like, on occasion they will say to liberate the Kuwaitque from, you know, colonialist rule or wherever it is that they're pushing into, or to

absorb or to take over. But the Trump thing is not the first time that Americans have said, you know what, this is not a line we accept. You're with us whether you like it or not. So just tell us what Washington does, a year later after the Continental Congress. It's an interesting thing. Both sides and the American Revolution have these misconceptions. The British think that actually so many Americans are actually loyal to them, that once they start fighting, it's all going to be over quickly and it's going to be fine. The Americans think, let's go get Canada, because once we get Canada,

we'll obviously knock out the British of that region, but we'll get them to join us too, and it's going to be fine. And so the Americans early in the war launch an expedition under, among others, the later notorious General Benedict Arnold and another general called Richard Montgomery, and they send them up the Hudson Valley and beyond into a direct assault on Quebec, which, of course, bear in mind a lot of these men are veterans of the Seven Years' War. They're battle-hardy. They know how to fight. Well, the other point is this. They have it in their rearview mirror, and they know that the

capture of Quebec was the thing that turned the tide in seven years war. So they think, oh, let's get Quebec, and that will help us turn things around here. It's, of course, also at that point, a major British stronghold in North America that is ready for them to get. They don't have a Navy. There's no chance that they could go down to the Caribbean. So, but they can march over land. It's territorially contiguous to Massachusetts and New York and so on. It makes sense. And so they march up and they launch an attack on the city of Quebec. But unlike the daring and ultimately successful assault by General Wolfe, the daring assault by the Americans on Quebec ends up be unsuccessful.

They're fighting in a blizzard. It's very difficult conditions. Montgomery is killed in the battle. Benedict Arnold has his leg shattered. He will have a limp for the rest of his life. And they end up having to retreat. and it's basically the end of any attempt in the revolution to try to take over Canada by the continental army. But in the end, by the end of the revolution, the battle lines still leave what is now Canada clearly in loyalist hands.

There's no real danger at any point in the revolution that is going to fall. Or is there a moment's when it looks like even that can go too? No, that's really the end of it. I mean, I think that the campaign that doesn't succeed in 1775 is sort of the last time. the Americans bother to go invade Canada, partly because, of course, as the war goes on, they have plenty of other fish that they can fry, and they're doing quite well. I mean, it's actually the British who, of course, are on back foot in many ways throughout the war. And the British end up, in fact, some years later, using Canada as the stronghold from which

they dispatch troops down south, hoping to knock out the Americans in a campaign which will result in the big surrender of the Battle of Saratoga, which is the turning point in the American Revolution. But what you also have, you have a really interesting situation where those people who have been in, you know, the newly minted America, who are loyal, are all sort of fleeing, and they also sort of run off to what is now Canada because they feel safer there. And so you have an even greater concentration of sort of loyalist sentiment, if you like. You know, we're running away from these nutty Americans who've suddenly overturned the cart completely, we're going to stay here because this is where order is and this is where British rule is

and this is where we remain loyal to the king. The migration to Canada by American Loyalist starts in 1776 with the evacuation of Boston by the British. And bear in mind in those days, as I'm sure your listeners know, it is much faster to travel over water than over land. And so Boston to Halifax is just not very far if you're thinking about it in seaborne terms. So when the troops of the civilians who choose to go with them evacuate from Boston, Halifax is a very obvious place for that to go. And some number of Bostonians

decide that rather to face the potential wrath of their patriot neighbors, they would prefer to go with the British and go to Halifax. And so you see then the beginning of what will end up being a huge set of movements within the colonies during a revolution, which really more properly I, and others would say, is a civil war where people who are on the British side end up having to leave their homes and go to find safety in British health strongholds. I mean, we've talked about, you know, the loyalists who have fled the revolution and have ended up in Canada. What we haven't spoken about are the indigenous loyalists. Because as you said, at the beginning of the last episode, you had tribes that were divided.

Some were loyal to the French and some were loyal to the British. So what of those who were loyal to the British, now the Americans have won, what becomes of them? Where do they go? Because the other tribes aren't exactly always going to be friendly to them. They've been at war for, you know, years and years. So what happens to them? Smack on the frontiers between the future United States and the British Empire in North America are the Hauden Ashani in upstate New York. Some know them as the Iroquois, right? Same people. Exactly. And this is the Confederacy of five or six nations who have been allied with the British fought with them in the Seven Years' War, the alliance between them cemented, among others, by Molly Brandt and

William Johnson, but also Molly's brother, Joseph Brandt, who is the major Mohawk leader in this period. So these people understand that the American patriots are the people who want their land. And the British are the people who are, you know, I mean, sure, strategically and not always with incredible generosity, but nevertheless, these are the people who are more likely to support their claims in the immediate aftermath of the Seven Years' War. There had been a kind of example of indigenous claims, confederation, their power in an uprising known now as Pontiac's Rebellion, which ended in defeat for the Indians in some ways, but represented the importance of confederation among the Indian tribes of the Great Lakes region. So who were they fighting?

Who was the Pontiac Rebellion against, exactly? They were dissatisfied with British rule in the Great Lakes, and they ended up being defeated by the British. But they also are people who have no truck with the American colonists. And it is in the wake of that war that William Johnson, actually, in upstate New York will end up coming up with another treaty that renews a lot of these sorts of alliances called the Treaty of Fort Stanwyx, which kind of, again, just sort of resettles the line, reestablishes the line between indigenous people and the British. So the point in all of this, is that when the patriots are coming, the natives are not happy. Now, they may not be happy with the British all the time, but they have treaty arrangements. These are real treaty arrangements

between sovereign entities, and those treaty arrangements, among other things, give them some confidence that if they continue to take the British side in this conflict, they will continue to be able to have these sorts of arrangements with the British. The colonists, no dice. As well as the indigenous peoples, we've also got coming in, Washington's forces, get more and more land. We've got more and more loyalists who are not white but black. You write a great deal about these extraordinary numbers of black slaves who take up the offer of the British that they're going to get freedom if they fight for the king. And they start arriving in some numbers. Tell us about them. This is one of the great subplots, if you will, of the American Revolution.

And I'm very glad that much more attention has been paid to the role of slavery in the American Revolution in recent years because it's going to be obviously a determinative thing for the future of the U.S. and the British Empire. But the story that is so interesting here is that very early in the war, like the first months, the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, who was chased out of his capital and Williamsburg onto a set of boats floating around on the Chesapeake Bay, issues a proclamation aimed at the enslaved members of patriot households saying, come to us, the British, come join our forces, and we will give you freedom in exchange for your fighting for us. And it's very strategic. He's not saying like all enslaved people come to

us. Loyalness to households get to keep their slaves. But it is the beginning of a number of such promises issued by the British during the war. Two enslaved African Americans say, come join us, we will give you your freedom. And over the course of the war, tens of thousands of enslaved men, also women and children, join the British. They're known often as black loyalists, a term that we might want to question because are they really loyal? Like, what's going on there? They're really about taking the best chance they can. But tens of thousands of people run to the British, and this constitutes the biggest act of mass emancipation in North America until the time of the Civil War. Now, we had a whole episode in an earlier series on slavery, on the extraordinary story,

which you've researched so wonderfully in your book about the slaves who come to Canada, what will be Canada, and end up being shipped to the colony at Sierra Leone. It's meant to be a free black colony of liberated slaves. Only after they've shivered and almost died in really inhospitable land where they can't farm. So give us that story again, just in case someone hasn't heard that episode. Well, let's pick up the story from Canada, because this is really interesting. So there's a guy who I think is the most underestimated figure in the history of the American Revolution. particularly on the British side. His name is Guy Carlton. He is a guy who has done a lot of service of

North America, and in fact, he's the guy in charge of Quebec at the time of the Quebec Act. He has a big role to play in getting the terms of that act established. In 1782, Guy Carlton is dispatched to North America with a very unusual task. He's sort of like the Lord Mountbatten, as it were, of the 18th century when Mountbatten is sent to India and told, okay, your job is to get a us out of here. That's the job that Carlton has. The war is over. His job is to get the British troops out and also to get out all of the civilians who wish to go with the British, which number in the tens of thousands, and include those black loyalists who have gotten the promises of freedom, who have ended up in, among other places, New York City, which is held by the British, and where Guy

Carlton very, I think, notably really, honorably, protect. their freedom against claims launched personally to him by George Washington, who wants them back because they count as property for the Americans. So Carlton evacuates these civilians, including upwards of 3,000 black loyalists, formerly enslaved people, to where? Where is nearby? Where is under British rule? Where has land that they can settle? To Nova Scotia. And they settle there in the vicinity of Halifax and the vicinity of Shelburne, Nova Scotia.

And there they try to make new lives of freedom alongside all of these white loyalist refugees as well. Maya, give us the scale of the loyalist immigration into what will be carried, into the loyalist havens in the north. We have a good 30,000 people leaving New York and settling in what is Nova Scotia, what will become New Brunswick. New Brunswick is a kind of new loyalist colony, right? It will be separated off. It'll be hived off. So the scale of settlement is so big. It doubles this place overnight. It is so big that it actually launches a reconfiguration of the governance of the region where the kind of western half of it on the western side of the Bay of Fonte gets turned into its own new province now, New Brunswick. And the loyalists are the reason that there's so many

of them. They create the city of St. John, as it is today. They create the town of Fredericton, the capital of New Brunswick. They transform the population of Nova Scotia. And among them are these several thousand black loyalists too. So we have tens of thousands of people showing up there, completely transformative of the future of this region. You focus in on your book and one wonderful character, Charles English, who becomes the new bishop of Nova Scotia and writes about this transformative world, this world, which is suddenly being flooded with the refugee loyalists. Just give us very briefly a quick pen portrait of what he sees. Inglis had been a minister in New York prior, during the revolution, and he had evacuated

at the end of the revolution. He, in fact, had authored a retort to Thomas Payne, who wrote famously common sense. And Inglis wrote a pamphlet rebutting common sense in which he says, I see no common sense in this, but much uncommon frenzy. Anyway, he ends. up becoming the first colonial bishop of North America, the bishop of Nova Scotia, and he returns to North America in the 1780s and makes this tour around his new bishop, Rickas Sea. And he goes around and he sees all of his former parishioners from New York City now settled in these different communities, Fredericton, St. John, Halifax, Shelburne, etc. And he is super impressed because he sees them in the space of really less than a decade. They have built churches.

houses, they have built towns, they have built estates, and they have created a whole new colonial society. So in the last episode, we saw how New France became a British colony, and in the first half of this episode, we've seen how so much of British America goes over to the new United States. In the next half, we're going to see an extraordinary bit of history that's very well known in America, but really isn't well known in Britain, which is this odd war of 1818. 12 in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars when the British retake Washington and burn it to the ground. Welcome back. Now, I know you tuned in to listen to a podcast about Canada. I bet you didn't think we'd talk about Napoleon, but we are going to talk about Napoleon. And why is Napoleon important to this story, Maya? Because Napoleon transforms the future of North America by selling the Louisiana territory to the United States.

So after the American Revolution comes, of course, the French Revolution, 1789, and after that, the rise of Napoleon and the British go to war to fight him. Now, among the things that happen during the fighting of Napoleon is the British force, the blockade of France. They begin stopping American ships and they begin to basically piss off the Americans. The Americans have a very important trade with France, and they don't like their trade being broken by the British. And this Meyer is one of a number of things that the British do at this period in the early years of the 19th century to irritate an increasingly confident American. Take us through the different things which bring the Americans to the brink and indeed the declaration of war in 1812. The United States is a brand new nation, and when it gets going, a lot of people, including Americans, but definitely in Europe, think that it's going to probably not make it, and nobody knows what

its future shape is going to be. And a lot of maneuvering is done by European countries, not least Britain, to try to keep the Americans on side in hopes that they might get some more of it back. And in fact, one of the biggest areas of contention in American politics in the first years of American Republican history is how to organize the relationship with Britain. All of this is really important as we head into the huge conflagration of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, because you have a faction of people in the United States who say, you know, Britain is really our best ally here. They are our most important trading partner by far. They neighbor us to the north and to an extent to the south in terms of the Caribbean, and we need to retain good ties with them.

that is embodied in the J Treaty in the 1790s and represents the view in particular of the federalists in the United States. On the other hand, you have a lot of Americans who, of course, are very eager to be able to indulge in all the things a free nation should be able to do, including trading with the people they want to trade with, including trading with France, one of America's historic allies. So in the period of intensifying Anglo-French conflict, particularly at sea, this issue of will the Americans lean British or will they lean French is really distorted by the British blockade and, as you say, by the acts of the British who are fighting an all-out war, backs against the wall, huge naval demands in which they say to the Americans,

you know, anyone born in the colonies, as we called them the colonies, three British, actually are British subjects and we can get them to serve in our ships. And, you know, this is recent history for them. So this British action that you've mentioned, the press ganging of American sailors, gives a lot of energy to the anti-British faction in the United States. This is compounded by the other big issue, which has been going on for decades, which is the issue of the West or the Northwest, as they call it, namely the Great Lakes region, where the British have promised, under the J Treaty, to evacuate the ports that they have along the Great Lakes region, but they've been awfully slow about doing it and dragging their feet, and the Americans want them out. So in our America series, we talked

about the Shawnee resistance and the fact that there were these two brothers who led the Shawnee who were promised things by the British sovereignty and protection, which they are going to try and hold on to. And yet there's a changing landscape all around them. I'm just in a nutshell. How does this contribute to the shifting sands? Picking up the theme of Indian confederacies. We have the Hadanoshani, we have Pontiacs rebelling, we have Tacomsa in the 18-teens coming together, creating this big confederacy who try to hold off the Americans who want to come in and knock them out of place and basically take over all their land. And this is a great sort of demonstration of Indian united confederated power that is, unfortunately, for them, beat back by the United States.

And so between all of these factors, this gives a faction of Americans who are anti-British, the ammunition they need to go into war with Britain directly. These people who are advocating for war are known as Hawks. They are the original war hawks in American history, a phrase that we have lived with ever since. That's really interesting. So I thought, yeah, I thought it was just because people are warlike, but I mean, does it have any kind of Indian origin to call them the hawks? I don't know. It tickles me to think that Donald Rumsfeld took his name as a hawkish man from that. President James Madison, who pushes this forward and actually declares war on Britain 1812, of presuming, I imagine, that the British are focused elsewhere, because this is the middle of the retreat from Moscow, and Napoleon is tying up all the tension of the British.

Presumably, he thinks it's going to be an easy thing just to snatch Canada from them at this point. We don't need to put up with all this irritation. We don't need them assisting the shorny. We don't need them blockading our ships and impressing our sailors. We can just take Canada and get rid of these guys once and for all. but it turns out to be more problematic than he expects, doesn't it, Meyer? It certainly does. I mean, this is a very sort of big war. It's a hard thing for people to wrap their heads around. You said in the intro that Americans are very familiar with it. I don't think

they are. I think that it's a very scattershot thing. And why? Because, I mean, first of all, the United States continues to be a quite small military power. They haven't got a big army at this point. And they certainly don't have a big Navy. That's the big thing. And if you really want to challenge British power now, as before, you have to go to Caribbean. So, They're not at a position to do that. And they share a big frontier with the British. So there's a lot of different points of possible confrontation. And those include, in particular, of course, the huge frontier along the northern edge of the United States, which ranges from the Great Lakes all along the borders with present at Canada.

Thousands of miles, a bleak open territory. Absolutely, which is not heavily settled in the Great Lakes region. So they try, again, as they tried in 17. to knock out British power in this region, and they think that they have a good plan to make because there's another subplot here that I think is important to draw out. We think of American independence as launching the United States of America, rightly, the biggest thing that came out of it, but it also launched a reconfiguration of British rule in Canada. We already talked about Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The other place that it really changes is the

province of Quebec, which is also split into two in 1791 in an act that is very important at Canadian constitutional history called the Canada Act, which basically hives off what is now Ontario from what is now Quebec and opens up this whole region, north of the Great Lakes, or around the Great Lakes, I should say, for settlement by land hungrily. colonists. So what happens after 1791? A huge number, tens of thousands of people, go over the border from the United States into British Canada. It's called Upper Canada at that time. And they take advantage there of abundant land, low taxes, and all they have to do is swear loyalty to the king. In fact, the tax burden of somebody in Upper Canada at this time is a fraction of what it is

in the United States. So fast forward to the 18T. you have a population of what are known as late loyalists, people who are coming from the U.S. into Canada, and the United States Americans think, oh, maybe these people actually just kind of want to join the United States. And the British administrators are very anxious about whether or not these people are going to join the United States. So a lot of the offenses in the War of 1812 against Canada are taking place in the kind of Great Lakes region, whether it's in the area of Detroit, where you have Shawnee Confederacy, or really around Niagara and going around Lake Ontario, you have a lot of efforts by the Americans to bring the English-speaking Canadians

onto their side. And the British are quite anxious about what's going to happen. There's a whole bunch of back and forth about all of this. And one of the most dramatic episodes in it is that the Americans successfully launch an assault around Lake Ontario, which results in the capture and the burning of the capital of the province of Upper Canada, then known as York, today known as Toronto. And the burning of the legislature of York will provide a kind of pretext. Causes Belli for what happens next. There's a burn for burn coming. I can feel it.

Exactly. So the big story, as far as Canada goes, is that the American assault on Canada is ultimately reversed. That is a big surprise, isn't it, Mike? There's no reason to assume that the Americans were going to be stopped because they had larger forces. They were on the offensive, and they clearly expected they were going to have an easy win.

Why are they stopped? It's not necessarily so obvious if you think about what it was that they went to war over in the first place back in the 1770s, which is taxation. On the British side of the border, the taxes are dramatically lower than they are on the American side of the border. That's very ironic. And in fact, it turns out, I mean, it's true. The British are worried. They don't know which way this is going to go. But in a great victory for them and in particular, a very important consolidating moment for modern English-speaking Canadian identity, the so-called late loyalists end up staying with the British, beating back the Americans. People don't generally like to get invaded, it has to be said. As a rule.

Well, I'm listening to these voices from Iran right now, right? And you hear people who say, we don't like the mullahs, but we certainly don't want the Israelis telling us what to do. You know, so I don't want to speak out of turn. But I mean, suffice to say, I don't think they like being invaded. And they end up joining together and beating back the American Army encounters, particularly around Niagara Falls. And that's kind of the end of it on that front. Now, this War of 1812 is. as I said earlier, a very biddy conflict. It's sort of here and there and everywhere. And one of the places that it ends up being for the British who have naval power at their advantage is in the Chesapeake Bay. So again, just for those who don't know their geography, this is inland from

the coast, and it leads to a whole variety of river systems, including the Potomac, which in turn leads to Washington. The two big cities that are relevant here are the cities of Baltimore and Washington, and the British send a fleet in there, and they harass people, and they take things over, and they besiege things. Their siege and occupation in Baltimore leads to the verses that will be written by one of the American captives during this British assault on Baltimore named Francis Scott Key, who, as he's sitting in the British prison, you know, is watching the artillery fire overhead and talks about the rocket's red glauble. in the verses that will become the American National Anthem to Star Spangled Banner.

This is all from this extraordinary moment in history. But let's focus on Washington, D.C. So President Madison, who's declared war, really without sort of thinking it through, is sitting down to a banquet or about to sit down to a banquet where the news comes that the Brits are on the edge of the town. The British are coming. The British are coming. I mean, it is literally that. 40 people are expected for dinner. And just when you're getting into his, whatever he's wearing, his white tie or whatever, he has to jump on his horse and flee. The British are coming. I do want to emphasize that this is a completely different scale of

thing from the American Revolution. We're not talking about a big land army marching against Washington. I mean, these are troublemaking raids that are intended to just put the Americans in their place. There's no intention of, you know, completely taking over the United States by force of arms. The British are more than busy at this time in the Spanish Peninsula. But they want to definitely put the Americans in their place. And so this week that's going around the Chesapeake ends up going down to decide to retaliate for that raid on York, Canada. And is there a sense of surprise on behalf of the British that they managed to get as far as Washington? Did they expect there's going to be as easy as it turns out to be? Who knows what they thought? But they do.

They get all the way up. And when they do end up there, they go, right, you burnt York, stroke Toronto. We think we might burn down your news. what is it called, a White House? Your new digs. Your capital, Madison, that's going, and they do. They set about setting fires, don't they, Maya? The Americans had burned the legislature in York. The British will burn the legislature in Washington, D.C. It is very interesting to me that these two countries, which both hold themselves up for centuries to come, as guardians of legislative traditions of the rule of law, will burn down each other's capitals when they get a chance. So, I mean, does this go down in history as a blow for Canada or a blow for Britain or, I mean, it's certainly a blow to America, but I mean, do the Canadians feel all muscular about this? And how does it play out, you know, for what is to come next?

They do. As a geopolitical thing, it plays out as a big nothing. Because in fact, after all of the skirmishing and fighting on many fronts, nothing really changes on paper. A fact that is really underscored by the fact the biggest American. victory in the War of 1812 is Andrew Jackson's successful victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, a victory that is scored after the peace has been signed in Europe, something that he doesn't know, because of course it takes a lot of time for news to go back and forth. So as far as the U.S. and Britain are concerned, I mean, it doesn't change a huge amount. But for Canada, this is quite important for the Indians. For Canada, it is important because it has proven that the late loyalists, the English-speaking subjects of Canada, the French-speaking subjects of Canada, are going to stay with the British. They're not interested in joining the United States. It helps harden

that border. And above all, it creates a sense of sort of national identity in Canada, particularly among a certain kind of anglophone elite that has found itself in power since 1791. For the Indians, this is devastating. They have been able to play powers off of one another. That ability had been, of course, eroded massively already at the end of the American Revolution. And with the death of Tecumseh, I mean, really, you see their ability to ward off expansion on the northwest frontier in the southeast suppressed. Andrew Jackson, who is the winner of the Battle of New Orleans, will go on to be the greatest, by which I mean most notorious kind of Indian killer

in American history in terms of single figures that you want to attach to the ethnic cleansing or genocide of Indians in American history. Andrew Jackson is the guy. And it's another huge blow against the reality of Indian sovereignty. But just to repeat in a sense and emphasize this point, we're doing the history of Canada. We're doing why Canada is separate from America and why Trump can't just walk in and assume that the Canadians are the same as Americans. This is the period. This is the moment when that border hardens. Well, the psychological border, if you like, you know, that this is not who we are.

You can't just assume this is who we are. And, you know, back off, Buster, because we are our own people. First of all, the American Revolution gives rise to the United States, but the biggest world power for the 19th century is not the United States. It's the British Empire. And the British Empire goes strong after the American Revolution for a whole range of reasons, including their gains in India and their securing of their possessions of the Caribbean, but also because they managed to come up with ways of ruling their empire, which are able to withstand the challenges of the French Revolutionary Wars of the 1990s onward. And those new ways of governing are exemplified in Canada. Canada is the place where the British come up with a different formula. They say loyalty, you've got to be loyal to us. We're going to have a hierarchical rule. You're not going to be equal. But you're going to pay low taxes and you're going to have civil rights and you're going to be able to have freedom of religion and these sorts of things. And a lot of people turn out to like it. The second thing I want to say out

of this, is that the American Revolution gives rise to two nations. It gives rise to the United States and it gives rise to Canada. And if you look at the history of Canada, you see a kind of mirror held up to the United States of a different way that you can think about the big issues at stake for the U.S. Those big issues include what sort of rights will ordinary subjects have, what will happen to slavery, what will happen to indigenous peoples, how are we going to organize democracy versus authoritarianism or democracy versus oligarchy? And each of those issues is every bit as live in Canada as it is in the United States. With different ratios, obviously the history of slavery in Canada is a subject that I think deserves much more attention. It's there, it's real,

but it is phased out much sooner. It is, of course, abolished in the British Empire in 1833. its economic role is very different from the United States, but that's one. Indigenous rights are a huge issue in Canada, as we see down to the present. We are going to talk about that in the next episode, John A. McDonald and those reservation schools, that is going to be where we go straight after this. Fantastic. It's a very important story. And then, and this is the one I want to highlight from the War of 1812, the balance of power between ordinary folks, a power elite, a person at the top, the ordinary folks versus the oligarchs, if you will, the ordinary folks versus the

political elite, the outsiders versus the insiders. All of these are really important issues in Canada, just as they are in the United States. But after the War of 1812, the Canadians will work them out in Canada, the Americans will work them out in the United States, and they are separate nations. So just before you go, Maya, I mean, you talked about the Canadian resistance to the will and might of America. You're kind of experiencing that in the modern-day context, just as Canada is right now, because you're working at Harvard.

And Harvard is really pushing back against the Trump administration. And you are leading the charge, Maher. I'm very proud to have you as our guest at this moment when you're taking on his Trumpness. Tell us a little bit about how you're taking it all on, and where are we at with this? Harvard has been the subject of a deeply political, unscrupulous attack, on some of the fundamental institutions, values, et cetera, that have helped make the United States

what it is, which include higher education, scientific research, et cetera. And I, along with colleagues, I'm a proud member of our newly formed chapter of the American Association of University Professors. We have filed a couple of lawsuits against the TRIP administration, challenging the illegal deportations and abductions of some of our international students and challenging some of the funding cuts that are being launched against our universities. And what I want to say here is that, you know, the United States broke away from Britain with a bunch of bright and shining ideals. We have not always lived up to those at all.

But one of the things that the United States has done, albeit fitfully, over its history, is provided opportunities for people to come to this country and to flourish. And one of the great engines for them to flourish are universities. And to attack universities, Harvard being the most elite, but only one, is to attack one of the central things that made America great in the first place. So do you think that Trump's assault on the universities will go the same way as so far his assault on Canada has gone? We're in a very dangerous position.

The courts have happily upheld the Constitution so far and upheld universities' challenges to what Trump is doing. But I'm very fearful. And we've been talking about Britain. Look at Britain. Oxford and Cambridge were the premier universities of the 19th century. They are still very significant, but British universities suffered from a real lack of funding relative to American universities, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. We gained in the US from a British brain drain over here. And I think that what's at risk here is a transformation that will lead to a huge brain drain from the US going to China.

Maya, thank you so much. There's so much to think about. And so much. much that we didn't think we were going to think about, but you always extend and increase our horizons. We're very grateful to you. Till the next time we meet is goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.